zondag 12 februari 2017

Sunday Stamps: Western hemisphere

Today's theme for Sunday Stamps is 'Western Hemisphere'. From the physics point of view I always think it hard to distinguish where the 'west' begins and ends, as well as where the 'east' does. North and south is easy, as the earth turns around the north-south axis. But from for example Greenland's point of view, we, the Dutch, are living in the east, and someone from New Zealand might consider India located in the west and the Americas in the east.
So today I think stamps from all directions will be okay :-)

Nevertheless I choose stamps from the 'West', from Dutch point of view and also generally accepted.

The following stamps I received from Dulce from Mexico. It doesn't happen often that I see newspapers being honoured by the Post, but the 100th anniversary of El Universal, last year, was a good opportunity to do so.
Also combs won't be pictured often on stamps. The original comb you can find in the Museo de Arte Popular.

Inside the pretty decorated envelope there was a great stamp, which I posted on instagram.

This stamp sheet I chose, regarding the things said in the first paragraph. It connects north and south, and from the physics point of view it connects east and west, and from generally accepted point of view, both countries mentioned are western. And, an extra: it connects history and present days.

It is from a serie of three stamp sheets, Dutch PostNL issued last year. All sheets contain similar stamps but the selvage is different. The series is from the 'Grenzeloos' ('Borderless') serie and this last year deals with the connection between the Netherlands and Australia.
The theme of this stamp sheet is 'Dutch emigration to Australia'.
The text says, that between 1950 and 1961 about 116,000 Dutch emigrated to Australia, because of misery in their homeland (the Netherlands) and the increasing threat of a Third World War in those years.
Does it sound familiar? I think, if populist leaders would know their own (personal, family's, country's) history they should have a more open, friendly view to everyone who is looking for a better place on this - our - earth. The immigrants in the fifties, sixties, were welcomed (and we forget that our ancestors of earlier centuries, colonial times, forced themselves to be welcomed in the 'new world', with negative impact to the people who were native since ages). So, even though PostNL obviously didn't intend to do, I think a stamp issue like this should plea for a warmhearted world, in which everyone is connected.